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Spent all day moving furniture, cleaning, and basically reorganising our major living spaces into more efficient configuration so as to free up more space in the house.

Pretty happy with the result

Media center back into the main living area:

Also making a bit of a sitting area by the main window in front of this pink sofa; unfortunately I couldn't take a picture of it because my poor phone can't handle that much glorious Summer sunshine, but it makes for a nice little seated area.

Big stuff is all done, but still probably just as much left to do sorting out the little things and reordering where everything's home is. Gotta find room for all the kids toys and adult mementos, as well as sort out a new desk somewhere for the PC to live. Oh well, that's a problem for tomorrow (or more likely, next month).

Either way, it was a nice opportunity to get these down and have a quick dust and once over with them:

I mean, I think it's perfectly normal to get down and giving your Lego Star Wars ships a good dusting and clean up every now and then. Seems perfectly acceptable to me.

Humming the Imperial March while doing so is the part that is a matter of personal preference and choice.

Well, it's not exactly "over the x-mas period" but the plasterer turned up today. They worked 8-4 and got far more plasterboard up than I was expecting them to be able to:

This is the section that'll be my part of the office. They've put the insulated plasterboard up around the skylight on the left and continued round to where it meets a little divider before it becomes the "sofa" section. There's none around where the radiator pipe is sticking out because they decided that they wanted me to frame the top of that up a bit nicer. I had no idea what to do with it as it's such an awkward shape so was waiting for them for guidance

They've also done all the way round around to my other half's section of the office. The precarious skylight above the stairs has all been boarded in and they've stopped just as it hits the stud wall I put up for the "boiler room"

There's just a few awkward-sized bits to cut in but I'd say this accounts for about 40% of the whole roof

It's nice to see actual progress, and to see them covering up and making good all the diagonal uprights

The one about the fucking space hairdresser and the cowboy. He's got a tinfoil pal and a pedal bin. His father's a robot and he's fucking fucked his sister. Lego. They're all made of fucking lego.

I don't have a house to do stuff on, but whenever I come home I usually get roped into some landscaping project or other. This week it was planter box for my sister's front yard. We've got some aluminium siding boards that were left over from another project as the main material, and chopped up a pine 4x4 into support legs.

It's been consistently 38C here for about ten days running, so all work has to take place in the morning between 8 and 10, before it gets too hot. So it's been staggered. We put the longer sides together a few days ago, and added two of the cross slats.

Today it was time to move the whole shebang out into the garden, and finish the short sides.

First, squaring it up

Add clamps

(not pictured: a period of increasingly sweaty measuring, holding, drilling, and bolting)

There's more progress shots on the twitterings if you want. It will (eventually) get taken apart, finished and painted, but I wanted to make sure it all works first. Though I can pretty much guarantee that taking the control panel apart will result in the wiring loom being torn apart due to short wires and poor crimping.

And another day's work on the loft. At least it feels like I'm getting my money's worth when I overhear the plasterers talking about how awkward a certain bit is or mentioning the steps they're going to have to take to make something good

The ceiling is starting to get covered and the structural stud that separates out my office bit is entirely boxed in now

And they've started on the other side, too, so that just leaves my lounging area the only section that's not been touched

The one about the fucking space hairdresser and the cowboy. He's got a tinfoil pal and a pedal bin. His father's a robot and he's fucking fucked his sister. Lego. They're all made of fucking lego.

Fences are the worst when it comes to property rights and responsibilities.

Yup. When we did our fence last year, we hired same company and did the exact same style as neighbor's existing fence but still had the installers do a little jog so ours was on our property where the fences connected. Just did not want any issues down the road.
So looks like:

We did similar across the front of our property at the old house. Same size and style, but we put the post on our property and hung the fence across the gap to butt up against theirs, but if there was ever an issue, could just cut it at the post and put in our own.

My work assistant’s fence also blew over! He already knows his neighbors will be jerks and refuse to help, so he’s looking to fund the repairs himself.

We haven’t been in contact with our neighbors yet. Both times Mori went over they were out (or not answering their door). We already had a guy come out and give us a quote to do work. What if our neighbors also got a quote? Or, is this something we contact the HOA over? We’re not clear!

If you have an HOA you should definitely skim through the rules or whatever and see if it says anything about situations like this

Edit if it doesn't and your neighbor still hasn't answered the door I'd say drop off a letter indicating your willingness to share the cost of repairs and possibly include the quote you got cause there is a chance they might have gotten a quote too or might know someone who could do the repair cheaper

It turns out it takes 7 days to board 99 metres squared of awkward-shaped loft. They got the first sections of skim on yesterday and today. I hope there's a maximum of three days left because that's pretty much all the money left in the budget for the entire loft.

It's starting to look like an actual room, well, my other half's section is

Mine is still looking a bit piecemeal:

They went to great lengths to tell me about all the tidying up they'd done, as previous to today it was like a bomb-site with bits of plasterboard strewn everywhere and a literal inch of dust on the floor. To be fair to them the floor looks great, and the scrap and torn pieces of plasterboard and piles of rubbish are all gone. The scraps of insulated plasterboard meanwhile:

Yeah, thanks guys. I see where they're coming from because that stuff is about £50 a sheet so there's a fair bit of value left in that. Except the roof is done and no-one is going to want to buy already-cut odd-shaped sections of plasterboard off me. Now they've stuffed it into a room where all my tools are so the tidy-up trip to the tip is going to have to come forwards. So much for a nice, easy weekend.

SporkAndrew on January 11

The one about the fucking space hairdresser and the cowboy. He's got a tinfoil pal and a pedal bin. His father's a robot and he's fucking fucked his sister. Lego. They're all made of fucking lego.

My monthly gas bill comes in: 50% higher than normal. My reaction is basically, WTF! I signed up for the balanced budget plan that spreads the bills out over the year so that my monthly bills are roughly the same during high usage and low usage periods. So this made zero sense to me, and reviewing my bill didn't reveal why.

So I call them up. Oops, my ridiculous bill is actually a ridiculous credit (thanks to a $250 deposit I had to put down around a year ago that I totally forgot about) and I won't even have to pay them anything until around March.

Yeah, thanks guys. I see where they're coming from because that stuff is about £50 a sheet so there's a fair bit of value left in that. Except the roof is done and no-one is going to want to buy already-cut odd-shaped sections of plasterboard off me. Now they've stuffed it into a room where all my tools are so the tidy-up trip to the tip is going to have to come forwards. So much for a nice, easy weekend.

When I finished my kitchen and had a whole heap of odd-sized MDF panels I just put the whole lot up on Freecycle and said if anyone wants this, it's yours so long as you take all of it.

I had enquiries for a week. There's always someone who measured once before cutting or needs to patch a hole or something.

I have installed my Nest thermostat as of last night! I already LOVE IT because it's solved some other issues I had with my old thermostat, beyond the main reason I bought it. Namely that I could only set my old one to "heat" or "cool", and had to do that manually. The old thermostat also thought that 6+ degrees over or under the temperature I set was totally fine, man! The Nest stops at the exact temperature I set it to, and can be set to "cool OR heat" mode. My old thermostat could be scheduled, but if I woke up early or something I'd have to get out of bed and walk into the kitchen to heat my apartment back up to non-sleeping-under-covers temps. Now I can literally change the temperature from my bed, on my phone.

***ULTRA LUXURY***

So very happy with it! I already suspect that it's going to save me quite a bit of money, now that my apartment isn't being constantly over-heated and over-cooled.

so I bought a house in september, I've been working on renovating it since

I brought in some help to retexture the walls and ceiling but otherwise I've been doing this myself with a helpful hand here or there

since I promised to post updates in this thread today and i just finished the majority of work excluding the bedrooms and some appliance and plumbing work here is my google album:https://photos.app.goo.gl/g7n3P3WCNRdfKtdL6

excuse the mess in latest photos I haven't gotten to the cleaning/organizing stage yet

My father suddenly got it into his head that the water heating system might need replacement. No issues with it, nothing wrong with it, but they’ve got a good deal going on solar water heaters and secretly I think he just wants solar everything. Me, I’d probably leave it until something actually went wrong, but “you’re supposed to replace this every ten years and I think this might have been installed in 2007.” Ok, so we toddle outside and eventually find the maintenance panel and check thie date of installation ...

My father suddenly got it into his head that the water heating system might need replacement. No issues with it, nothing wrong with it, but they’ve got a good deal going on solar water heaters and secretly I think he just wants solar everything. Me, I’d probably leave it until something actually went wrong, but “you’re supposed to replace this every ten years and I think this might have been installed in 2007.” Ok, so we toddle outside and eventually find the maintenance panel and check thie date of installation ...

1996.
Well. Ok then.

... he’s on the phone to the solar people now,

I'm in the same boat. Please let me know how he likes the solar heater once he gets it installed.

Steam ID: Webguy20
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981

+3

3clipseI will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular

Definitely do some research and crunch numbers, though. Here in NZ there's no subsidies and there essentially isn't really a good economic reason yet to switch in most cases. Given that the national grid is basically 90% renewable (and my own house is probably basically entirely powered by hydro/wind), putting in Solar where I am is mostly an exercise in paying money to feel good about myself.

However, further north where there's more sunshine and a bit of coal power, it the economics begin to swing towards a more balanced outlook, so it's worth the time to do the research and see what solution works for your situation.

However a solar hot water system like a Solahart will typically give instant savings on your power or gas bill regardless of any incentives or subsidy schemes, but they can be frightfully expensive and thus take some time to pay for themselves. The solar water heater on my parents house died about 20 years ago, and the cost to replace it with a solar system of similar performance from a reputable brand was such that they had a gas hot water system fitted to replace it. Which fucking sucked in comparison, and eventually (I wanna say about 5 years ago now??) they got a new solar hot water system.

The costs and efficiencies between twenty years ago and now aren't even comparable - the tech is completely different.
I think this one actually runs off our house grid, it's just they have to be equipped to take renewables instead of gas so you can't just plug in any ol heater. But it's a stiebel eltron hot water pump, for the curious.